The present invention relates to a fluid distributor system, and particularly to one which may be controlled so as to distribute one or more fluids from an inlet pipe to a selected one of a large number (e.g. many tens) of outlet pipes. The invention is particularly useful in cow milking machines for controlling the supply of water and/or air in order to effect rinsing and/or drying operations with respect to the many milking cups of the machine, and the invention is therefore described below with respect to this application.
A number of systems have been proposed for distributing fluids to a plurality of outlets, and particularly for rinsing and/or drying the milking cups in cow milking machines, but the known systems are usually very complicated in construction and therefore costly to produce, and/or are extremely limited in the number of outlets they can accommodate.